an RPG blog

Category: administrivia

I’ve moved Tales of the Rambling Bumblers from its long-time home at webamused.com to here, at wordpress.com. So you should probably update your bookmarks. The reasons behind it are mostly a crappy webhost (lypha.com) that seems to get crappier every year, and a bunch of malware attacks that took far too long to clean up thanks to the crappy host’s crappy hosting. It’s not the only hosting service I deal with, so I suppose I could have just moved it over to one of the others, and transferred the domain name, but in the end this is just easier. Webamused was mostly defunct anyway: I got it way back when I wanted to learn how to create websites. Now that I do that for a living, or at least as part of my living, maintaining it is too much like work when all I really use it for is blogging.

So, here we are. Eventually I may spruce it up a bit with a new theme and header, but for now, welcome back to the Tales… of the Rambling Bumblers!

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At the suggestion of one of my commenters, I tried adding some social stuff to the blog so that people could submit posts to Digg, Reddit, and so forth. Since I don’t use any of those, I don’t really know how valuable they are… but I ended up turning off the Digg button for now, since their site seems to be down and that prevents my site from loading their button properly. I might add it back in later if they fix whatever’s ailing them…

Also, I’ve enabled caching on the blog, hoping to speed things up further. Let me know if you see anything broken or working funny. Installing it was more of a chore than I had hoped…

update: now they’re back, so I’m re-enabling it… humph. We’ll see if this is worth it.

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Since all the cool kids are doing it (see below), and I actually have a blind friend who might someday stumble across this blog even though he’s not much of a roleplayer, I’ve added Odiogo’s text-to-speech reader to the blog.

Odiogo is a service that provides an audio version of your regular feed. The text-to-speech technology used is quite decent, so it turns your RSS feed almost into a podcast. You can also subscribe to this podcast using iTunes, so your readers can listen to your posts while commuting to work for example.

I’m still not jumping on the Twitter bandwagon. No sir.

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Zombots are corpses that have been infested with nanite colonies that grow mechanical linkages to make them lurch around in an unholy resemblance to life. Zombots are hideous travesties, with wires and rods piercing their flesh, writhing under their skin and snaking around their bloody and decaying bodies, manipulating them like grotesque marionettes. In settings where the Guts skill is used, encountering a Zombot requires a Guts check.

Zombots have no other drive than to create more Zombots and consume flesh and circuitry to sustain themselves, though forbidden Necrotech can be used to command them. In its inactive form, the nanites are a grey dust (Zombot Dust) that is harmless unless it comes in contact with a corpse or an open wound. A corpse will become a functioning zombot in 1d6 rounds; a living being will have to make a Vig roll every hour or suffer a Wound and once it becomes Incapacitated will rise as a zombot. Zombots require flesh to function (it’s part of the programming of the nanites), so although fire won’t destroy the mechanical parts, if you burn away all the flesh, the Zombot is destroyed. Zombots require a steady infusion of new flesh and circuitry to sustain their activity, and will always be on the prowl trying to consume; once a Zombot has killed a victim it will spend 1d4 rounds feasting, ignoring what else is going on unless it comes under attack. If it spends more than a day without being able to consume anything, it will go into hibernate mode, remaining motionless and emitting no energy readings until a victim gets within movement range (Pace).

When deciding what to attack, the Zombot will go first for the closest person who attacked it, next for the closest victim (choose randomly for equally distant targets); count all robots, computers, and sophisticated machinery as potential victims. Zombots will only employ ranged attacks (if the form has them) if it is not possible to close to melee. Zombots will incorporate whatever weapons the victim was carrying into itself and use them. Zombot infection, however, is only carried by natural weapons, not incorporated ones.

Trafficking in Zombot dust (and all forms of Necrotech) is punishable by death in New Ark City.

Zombots

Zombots have stats as their living counterpart with the following exceptions:

Str: +2d Smt: Unintelligent Pace: -2.

Undead: +2 Toughness, +2 to recover from Shaken, No Called Shots, No Wound Penalties
Infectious: creatures bitten/clawed by Zombots must make a Vig roll every hour or suffer a wound, and will become Zombots after they’ve been Incapacitated
Regeneration none while active, Fast once killedWeakness Fire, double damage, prevents regeneration

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Since I’m getting a flood of spam comments, and no legitimate ones (are any of you even reading this any more?) I’ve switched comment authentication back on. If you don’t have a TypeKey id, you’ll have to go register on their site. It’s pseudonymous…you don’t need to enter any personally identifying information to get one; it’s free, it’s usable at a whole bunch of sites besides this one, and it really helps me cut back on the stupid spammers that want to turn this blog into a link farm. Register today!

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Since Russell can’t be bothered to set up a free Typekey registration to authenticate to this blog, I’ve once again enabled non-authenticated comments. If I get a flood of spam, though, I’m turning it back off.